


Dark Paradise

by Nevcolleil



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Role Reversal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 02:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13626789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: “Welcome to the Glade, Greenie,” the boy laughed. “Glad you finally made it.”And Newt limped away from the metal cage from which he’d been pulled, away from the cluster of boys gathered around it, his own breathing harsh in his ears and his chest too tight.In which Newt is the new Glader with the dark secret, and Thomas is still the one determined to lead them all to safety somehow.





	Dark Paradise

Is it any surprise, really, that he fell - so fast and hard - into his place at Thomas’s side?

When he first came up in “the box”, he didn’t remember having known ‘Thomas’ before - or, at least, having known of him. Having spotted him right away amongst the other boys selected for the advanced trials, the tests so important that near constant environmental assessment and surveillance were required. (So important that Newt had been entrusted with aspects of that surveillance.)

He didn’t remember silently cheering on the cheeky, dark-haired boy with the amber-colored eyes who proved perhaps to be the fastest in the Glade - and the least predictable, hence his having been passed up for the position of maze runner by ‘Ben’, despite his speed. He didn’t remember his increasing despair as he watched boy after boy stung in the night, snatched by the macrobiotic machines the self-named Gladers called ‘Grievers’, crushed in the cogs of the Maze’s ever-changing landscape once banished into its depths. 

He didn’t remember setting down his headset, the day Ben too met this fate (the day Thomas, at last, proudly accepted the cuffs and chestpiece of a Runner and took Ben’s place) - visibly calm but secretly trembling right down to his bones in fear and anguish.

“How can we just sit here and watch them die, Teresa?” he didn’t remember saying that day, hidden away in a shadowy alcove he’d hoped would give them some privacy.

“It isn’t our choice, Newt,” he would later forget her saying back. “And it isn’t like it’s for nothing,” she had tried arguing. “We can learn so much from how they respond to the current strain of the Flare under controlled circumstan-”

“It’s not like _we’re_ killing them,” she’d resorted to saying, helplessly, when he’d only scoffed at her bargaining. 

“Yes, well, we’ve not tried to defend them, have we?” he’d railed, against WCKD and himself - and everything he and Teresa had been conditioned to accept - only to be stripped of all memory of this resolution before Paige had him dropped into the Glade like any other trial candidate.

And yet... Is it any wonder that Newt was drawn, so surely and so certainly, to such a one as Thomas?

His was the first face to greet Newt the day the box brought Newt up to the Glade - or, rather, the night. The box made his delivery unusually near to sunset, Newt would be told later, and the Runners had returned to the Glade from the day’s run.

Newt didn’t understand those words yet - ‘Runners’, ‘Glade’, or the word that the dark-haired, amber-eyed boy with the cheeky smile called him: ‘Greenie’. 

“Welcome to the Glade, Greenie,” the boy laughed. “Glad you finally made it.”

And Newt limped away from the metal cage from which he’d been pulled, away from the cluster of boys gathered around it, his own breathing harsh in his ears and his chest too tight.

He had nothing to limp _towards_ \- just the green of this ‘Glade’ he’d apparently found himself in, surrounded on all sides by the most frighteningly high walls he _believed_ he had ever seen. He knew nothing of what existed on either side of the walls he saw; he didn’t even know his own name.

But when a large, tanned hand set itself atop Newt’s shoulders - long fingers with a strong grip - rather than jump in fright as he might have expected himself to do, if he hadn’t been too mindless with confusion and fear for expectations, Newt felt not like he’d been grabbed by a stranger, but instead as though he’d been caught in the middle of a fall. Saved from an inevitable crash.

“Hey, just try and breathe, alright? I know the first day’s scary, but we’ve all been through it,” Thomas said, gesturing to first the Gladers blatantly oggling Newt from nearby, and then to the various groups of boys Newt could see at a distance - doing this or that at different locations throughout a primitive but tidy looking village. “And I’m here to help you. My name’s Thomas. I’m assuming you don’t know yours yet. None of us did when we just got here.”

“I- No. No, I don’t. I’m sorry. I’ve no idea what any of that means,” he could only reply, inexplicable comfort with the other boy’s touch or not. “ _Here_? I don’t know where ‘here’ is. I don’t know who you all are. Thomas, is it. _Why_ can’t I remember my own bloody name?”

Had he expectations, Newt might also have expected Thomas to laugh at him, or to behave impatiently in the face of Newt’s utter helplessness. But the corner of Thomas’s mouth just curled that little bit more, and his eyes shone not with unkind mirth but with warmth. With what Newt would soon learn, through watching Thomas’s interactions with the others (and enjoying Thomas’s presence himself) to call sympathy.

“That’s a lot of questions to tackle all at once, Greenie,” he said. “No, it’s alright. I had the same ones. But it’s gonna take me some time to answer them all, and it’s almost nightfall, so... walk and talk? Come on, follow me.”

Newt did. And years later, even after all that’s happened - after all he’s endured, all they have lost - he is desperately glad that he did.

That he never stopped.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this comes from the song "Dark Paradise" by Lana Del Rey.


End file.
